Building a Documentary Around Sound
Usually, cinema revolves around images. Yet with documentaries, a project’s source material can sometimes be sound. Last year, two documentaries demonstrated it’s possible to construct a hard-hitting narrative around audio: Like a Spiral, by French-Moroccan director Lamia Chraibi, and Intercepted, by Canadian-Ukrainian filmmaker Oksana Karpovych. The two filmmakers spoke about their projects.
In the documentary short Like a Spiral five migrant women tell director Lamia Chraibi about the traumas they experienced working in Lebanon under the kafala system. The sponsorship program connects migrants’ residency permits to their employers and exposes workers to exploitation and other human rights violations.
Some of the women requested anonymity for safety reasons.
“I must admit that at the beginning of the project I saw this as a constraint,” explained Chraibi during a discussion titled Navigating Sensitive Topics at the Montreal International Documentary Festival (RIDM). “I thought it would be complicated to make a film without seeing their faces.”
But Chraibi knew the risks for the women were real — loss of employment, passport confiscation, imprisonment or deportation. So she decided to conduct the interviews alone, with neither a crew nor a camera.
The choice paid off.
“It allowed me to establish a real closeness with them,” Chraibi said.
A Dialogue With the City
The tone is set from the beginning of the film, as the domestic workers explain the heart-rending experience of leaving their young children at home in the hopes of earning money through the kafala system to provide their kids a better future.
The women speak of feeling rejected by their employer families, the harassment they experienced in the street, and other daily acts of violence. “They allowed me to access something very authentic,” said Chraibi.
She took inspiration for the film’s visuals from what her protagonists said in their interviews.
“The women started to speak to me about Beirut by personifying it, as if they had a love-hate relationship with the city. From a creative point of view I thought it would be interesting to establish a dialogue between them and the city.”
As we hear the migrant workers’ stories, a camera weaves through the city, showing various beige buildings in a sequence shot, static nighttime shots punctuated with fireworks, balconies, low-angle shots, and a window lit up at night through which we see a woman in a kitchen. This all conveys the feelings of dizziness, being trapped, and uprootedness experienced by someone living under the kafala system.
Singing and Smiling Faces
Halfway through the documentary, Chraibi broadens the film’s scope by showing a wide shot of the capital with its cluster of residential buildings and skyscrapers. The migrant workers explain how they were affected by the port explosion of 2020, when improperly stored ammonium nitrate detonated causing more than 200 deaths and thousands of injuries.
“With this crisis…Lebanon crumbled,” one says. “Even if we are of many colours — Black, white, yellow — at heart, it hurts us to see the Lebanese in this state. Before, we witnessed a very nice, bright Lebanon. Now, Lebanon is dark,” says another.
Chraibi took care not to “invisibilize” her protagonists through her creative choices. “The fact that these women are already invisible in society raised a lot of ethical questions for me.”
Instead, she created a visual montage where the sequence shots of building facades give way to Beirut at night, punctuated with fireworks, then to a “dancing” Beirut, where we see women’s faces. They’re dressed in bright colours, full of life, dancing, singing, smiling, all to lively music.
“I want to speak for those who cannot,” one of the protagonists says, as if to offer solace to the women still living under the kafala system.
Intercepted: Putting Images to Phone Calls
The soundtrack that inspired the documentary feature Intercepted feels like it belongs to a horror film.
Soon after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, filmmaker Oksana Karpovych learned that excerpts of intercepted phone calls between Russian soldiers and their families back home were being posted by Ukrainian security services to their YouTube channel every day.
In these three- to four-minute excerpts, the Russian soldiers expressed all the bad things they thought about the Ukrainian people, often using brutal, cruel language.
“At first, I was very disturbed,” Karpovych recounted at a discussion dubbed Socially Engaged Cinema and Contemporary Forms during RIDM 2024. “Then I thought it was extremely important material, and I have to absolutely do something with this.”
The challenge was how to create images to accompany a soundtrack that conveys the war’s worst atrocities. “The way we decided to approach the film visually was as a sort of nontraditional road movie,” said Karpovyck. “We travelled across Ukraine with a small crew of four people.”
She decided to focus on three visual threads.
The first was a series of long sequence shots that showed vehicles driving through the devastated country, creating a disturbing, oppressive atmosphere. In the gripping opening scene we are in a Russian tank, captured by the Ukrainian army, that is advancing on the small, muddy road of a Ukrainian village.
“It was very important to me, and also very subjective, to create a nightmarish vision,” the filmmaker explained.
The second visual thread is made up of static shots that testify to the impact of the war. We see classrooms, kitchens, living rooms, courtyards and public places devastated by what we presume to be shrapnel.
The third thread shows scenes of daily life: Ukrainians cooking in a bunker, gardening, taking care of their livestock, playing volleyball, smoking while looking out a window, all with stoic, unshakeable expressions in the face of war.
“Another expression of the resistance is that people get very quiet, and each time the attacks happened, the ones that I witnessed, people were not crying; they were always very, very quiet. They looked deeply sad, but there was something in the silence that I found very strong, and something that eventually [I was] trying to bring into the film,” explained Karpovych.
She chose not to show any scenes of war, bombing, or explosions. Nor did she show any Russian or Ukrainian soldiers. Instead, she concentrated on the Ukrainian people’s daily resistance.
“It’s thanks to this part of the film that I found the courage to listen and to work with audio material as heavy as these Russian conversations,” she said.
